1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a scanning system which transfers an image from a scanner over a network to a client computer. The invention is more particularly related to a system which allows a client computer to control a scanner connected to a network and receive images from the scanner over the network in a manner which emulates a direct connection of the scanner to the client computer. The invention is still further related to transferring an image from a scanner connected to a scanner server to a client computer over a network without the intermediate step of storing an image file on a file server.
2. Discussion of the Background
With the increasing familiarity of business people with computers, more computer based tasks are being performed by more people in office environments. Image scanners are becoming a more popular device in office environments both for enabling images to be included into documents and also to obtain images of documents in order to perform optical character recognition.
Heavy users of scanning devices usually have the luxury of ready access to a scanner. However, many people who use image scanners on an infrequent basis do not have the luxury of being able to directly scan an image into an application program running on their own computer. In the situation where the user does not have his own scanner, the user must go to a scanner and generate a file containing the image. This image file can then be copied to a floppy disk and walked to the user's computer. The user's computer then reads this disk in order to process the image file. However, depending on the resolution of the scanned image, the image file may be extremely large, thus making it inconvenient for the user to copy the image file to a floppy disk and then transfer the image file on the floppy disk to the user's computer.
In an attempt to overcome this "sneaker network" concept of transferring images in which the user must physically carry the image on a storage medium from one computer to another, Hewlett-Packard has developed the HP Scanjet 4si which allows a scanner to obtain an image file and the image file is subsequently written to a network file server. The image is stored on the file server, for example in a computer mailbox. After the image file is stored on the file server, the file can be retrieved and transferred over a computer network to the local hard disk or other storage device within the user's computer, referred to as a client computer.
Disadvantages of this conventional system include the need of a separate file server and an intermediate storage of the file on the file server which is different from the final destination of the file. Further, there is no direct control of the scanner by the client computer nor can an application directly input the image file from the scanner. Therefore, conventional solutions to sharing a scanner among a plurality of users have their drawbacks and are not very convenient for the users of the shared scanner.